The Restorer Page 6

  He turned down the street without waiting for an answer.

  As she crossed the courtyard towards the kitchen, she heard Dad’s voice from inside the house.

  ‘Daniel. Speak properly. Open your mouth. Did you do it? Answer like a normal person.’

  Freya paused in the kitchen, Dad’s shadow ahead of her in the hallway. Then she heard quick, sharp steps on the stairs that could only belong to Mum.

  ‘Roy,’ Mum said.

  ‘What?’ Dad answered, but his voice was different, now that he was talking to Mum, like he knew exactly what she meant.

  Mum came the rest of the way down the stairs and walked straight past Freya and out into the courtyard. Dad came past too, hands in pockets like the boys she saw sometimes at school, when they were in trouble, but not like that at all, either. Freya stood beside the open door, so that she was out of sight.

  ‘I was just having a conversation with him,’ Dad said.

  ‘Just a conversation?’ Mum said. ‘With your son?’

  After a pause, Dad answered in a quieter voice, ‘You say it like he isn’t.’

  ‘Oh, shut up about that. I saw how you were standing over him. What would you have done if I wasn’t there?’

  He muttered something.

  ‘Right,’ Mum said.

  Dad said something else, but Freya still couldn’t catch it.

  Mum sighed in an exasperated way. ‘Do you realise how you sound?’

  Dad’s words came out in an explosion of breath. ‘I know how I sound! He’s still my son, as far as I know, and you’re not going to make me feel like shit every time I—’

  Her voice cut through his. ‘Just say the word, Roy—say it.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about that,’ he said.

  ‘Or what?’ she said, something fierce and eager creeping into her tone now. ‘Come on. It’s been a while since you’ve made a good threat—let’s hear it.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘What’s it like then?’

  Freya leaned across the kitchen counter, just enough to see what was happening through the window. Mum’s arms were folded across her chest, her face angled up to Dad. His hands hung at his sides as if he didn’t know where to put them. Freya’s belly tightened, and there was a beating inside her head as she watched Mum put her hands on Dad’s chest and push him back.

  ‘What?’ Mum demanded. ‘What are you going to do?’

  Freya picked up a glass from the sink, held it over the lino floor. She would drop it. She would drop it and everyone would come running in. Everything else would be forgotten. She couldn’t feel the glass—it was as if she were holding nothing, just heat in her fingertips. The beating in her head grew stronger, like there was a bird trapped inside her skull, trying to break out. The silence outside filled with the thrumming of cicadas, the sudden long blast of a ship’s horn, the distant wrestling of the sea and the shoreline.

  ‘Okay,’ Dad said at last. ‘Okay, then.’ He took a step back.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry.’

  He coughed. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I’m trying, you know. I’m trying.’

  ‘You’re sorry for trying?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ His voice had softened. ‘I’m sorry for being an arsehole. There, I said it. I’m an arsehole. But I’m trying—you don’t know how hard.’

  ‘Yes, you certainly are an arsehole sometimes,’ Mum said.

  ‘Didn’t I just say that?’

  ‘A real arsehole.’ She pushed him lightly on the shoulder.

  He looked at her, his face motionless, his arms taut, then he began laughing, and Mum started laughing too, the laughter brief, a little shrill. They laughed and then they were quiet again, still facing one another.

  ‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘I am. And I’m sorry.’

  ‘Right.’ Mum took a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, tapped one into her hand. As she lit it, she studied Dad. Her eyes remained on his as she exhaled, but she was smiling again, the smile hard, like she was amused at something that might make another person feel sad. ‘Let’s see how long you stay sorry.’

  ‘Maryanne.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want you to leave again.’

  ‘You made a promise. What happens is up to you.’

  ‘Well…’ Dad said, but he didn’t finish.

  He came back inside and went upstairs without even a glance towards Freya. She listened to him moving around upstairs above her head. Daniel had turned on the television. Doctor Who was on. Mum was still in the courtyard, smoking her cigarette. It was humid and stifling in the kitchen. Freya realised that her hand was still clenched around the glass. She put it back on the sink. Dad had started hammering again—hard, precise strokes at measured intervals—and Freya stood alone in the kitchen as that noise filled the house.

  6

  Roy’s hammering had set the dog down the alley barking again. Stupid animal. Maryanne ground the stub of her cigarette against the brick wall and lit another. She made herself breathe slowly but she could feel her heart beat, the flicking pulse of her blood, and the new cigarette trembling between her fingers.

  The house loomed over her, its edges growing vague against the sunless sky, but the blistered paintwork on the windows, and the salt-pitted brickwork, the roof with half its gutter hanging loose, were easy enough to make out. She could imagine it all collapsing on top of her. It did not feel like home, or even like she belonged here, or that any of them did. It felt like something in the house was set against her, had been from the start. Something that was becoming more obvious even as Roy threw himself into it heart and soul—and he was good at this, had always been good at this, working with his hands.

  She pushed the thought away, returned to the moment that had just passed. The way he’d confronted her just now, the look of him—the tightness in his body as he’d stood over her, his fists clenched, that cord of muscle sprung up in his neck, and his eyes, the light in them—it hadn’t felt real, like a memory more than something happening there and then. A small, fierce part of her had wanted him to lose it then, to make it all simple. But how close had he really been? Was she just afraid that he would, and was it simply her own fear she’d seen?

  Maybe it was something in her he was responding to, that dangerous residue of anger that remained even after they’d both agreed to let go. It wasn’t right to hold on to it now. At least not if she wanted to make this work—and she had to make it work. She’d allowed him back in. No one had held a gun to her head. There’d been an opportunity to finish it for good, and no one would have blamed her if she had, but she hadn’t. She’d gone back to him.

  Not that anything was ever so clear-cut, not when you were in the thick of it, not even when you looked back on it later, not with a man like Roy, who was all charm when he wanted to be, larger than life, and you wanted to see that side of him too, and did anything you could to keep seeing it, because what was the world when that was taken out of you, that hope, that desire? And there were Freya and Daniel to think about, too. Once you had children with someone, you couldn’t ever step back from that. There was a connection, and you made of it what you could. Roy was in her life and would always be, one way or another, no matter what else the future held. She twisted her wedding ring and slid it up against her knuckle. The ring felt heavy, as if she might break her finger, snap the bone, by pulling a little more firmly on it. But her hands were stronger than they looked.

  After what had happened, after what he’d done, nearly a year ago now, she’d returned to her mother’s house with the children. She’d walked into the bedroom that had once been hers, wrenched the ring off, and thrown it against the wall. The ring had rebounded and disappeared in a flash of gold. She’d searched for it the next day, and the day after, but with no success. How could you lose something in such a confined space? She’d wanted to find and get rid of i
t properly, to end the relationship with a proper gesture. There were only so many places you could look in such a room. Every minute, every hour that she couldn’t find it, felt like a defeat. Her mother cleaned every room in the house once a week. She couldn’t find it either.

  Maryanne had eventually stopped looking and stayed there, in her mother’s house, with her children, trying to breathe, to get through each day. And, as always, alongside the anger and the fear that faded as they always did, Maryanne began to miss Roy—the densely packed heaviness of his body, how it made her feel grounded when it rested on top of hers, even just his hand, those rough fingers splayed across her breast or her belly. Yes, she missed him. And there’d been no one she could talk to about that, least of all her mother.

  As the weeks became months, she’d lie there on her bed at night, feeling her own lightness. She had dreams sometimes of floating from her body, drifting out into the night unencumbered. They were nightmares. There was nothing to keep her steady, no sense of purpose, nothing to preoccupy her when she wasn’t at work, good or bad, just this emptiness that seemed to be saying, now what? She hadn’t counted on that uncertainty, or that the lack of pressure would so often feel simply like a lack, or that under it there’d be the dreadful feeling that things between them were unfinished.

  She’d wake up, jaw clenched painfully hard, and get up and close the window, shut the blinds and then open them again, pace up and down with her arms folded across her chest, shivering but not putting on anything warmer because the cold reassured her. She’d stand and stare out at the streetlight half hidden by the leaves of the tree outside, listening to the formless roar of traffic on distant roads, trapped in her childhood bedroom like she was caught in some perverse winding back of her own life.

  It was terrifying, that sense of hurtling backwards. Sixteen years since that room had been hers. Sixteen years, and now here she was again, all of that struggle and failure behind her. The posters were gone, but her bed remained, and her desk, and there was still a bookcase beside the desk, though the books on it were no longer hers. The memories here were like a smell that you only noticed when you first came in.

  Some nights sleep wouldn’t come to her at all. A wakefulness bloomed in her, so intense it was as if something made of needles were trying to claw its way out. She’d watch as dawn spread over the street. She’d check on Daniel in the other room, his frail body hardly taking up the bed, and she would lean in close to make sure he was still breathing, as if he were a newborn infant and not the son she’d done her best, her very best, to look after, for better or for worse, for seven years. She would do better. You could always do better. If you didn’t think you could do better, then what sort of parent were you?

  Many of the days in her mother’s house passed leaving no impression on her at all. She did what she had to at work, kept it together there, because for all its difficulties, work had always been the easiest part of her life, and that was that. She heard from Roy a few times, messages on the answering machine—terse, factual accounts of selling their house and barely breaking even, and getting rid of everything that she hadn’t packed into her suitcases on that day he’d come home to find her gone. Others needed those things more than him, and why should he care if she didn’t? Then it grew quiet, and after eight months she had almost stopped expecting to hear from him. She no longer felt the absence of that grounding weight at night. One by one, his fingers lifted from her skin.

  Maryanne hadn’t been thinking about him that day he turned up again, but she’d known the instant before she opened the door. His beard was gone and he was lean, the bones of his face more cleanly defined, his eyes brilliant and clear. A dizzying vertigo struck her, as if she were still in high school and he was there again, at the door of her parents’ house, to pick her up.

  ‘Maryanne.’ He swallowed, smiled unsteadily. ‘You look good.’

  Her grip tensed on the door. The sense of his body poured into her, the raw vitality of it, the barely suppressed energy, his feet, shod in the usual workboots, the left pointed towards her, right near the threshold. Her mother was at the end of the hallway, watching. Maryanne wrenched herself into action. She began to push the door shut, to close him out.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Please. I won’t keep you.’ The smile was gone. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please, don’t close the door.’

  She felt that if she did close it, something would happen—something massive and irreversible. Or maybe she’d paused because he didn’t even try to prevent her closing the door. Or maybe it was the sadness in his eyes. Nothing put on about that—it was real.

  ‘Please wait,’ he said again.

  She kept the door open.

  There was a gift Roy wanted her to have, not for her but for Daniel. Their fingers didn’t touch as she took the parcel.

  ‘I wrapped it myself,’ he said.

  She fingered the package. ‘You didn’t do a very good job.’

  He flinched a little. That made her feel good, and then guilty, as if she were taking advantage of his weakness.

  ‘I want to see you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be for long. It can be in a cafe or someplace like that. Somewhere where’s there’s people around.’ His voice sped up, the words tumbling over one another. ‘I don’t want anything else. I just want to talk. I wouldn’t do anything else—or expect anything even.’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ she’d told him. ‘Call me in a week.’

  She was happy with how she’d said that, the decisiveness in her tone.

  Her mother was waiting for her with crossed arms. ‘You’re not going to see him again, are you? I hope you understand why that would be a terrible idea.’

  Perhaps it was her mother’s reaction that had solidified everything, that had pushed her into making a decision too quickly.

  ‘I can see him,’ she said, ‘if I want to.’

  The air hissed out of her mother’s mouth. ‘Why don’t you put the children first for once?’

  ‘You don’t think that’s what I’m doing?’

  Maryanne walked away before her mother could answer.

  That night, in the darkness of her room, Maryanne felt more restless than ever, by turns hopeful and sick with worry. The thing that had driven her back to her mother’s house had become vague, uncertain, something she could barely bring herself to touch with her thoughts, though she had promised herself that she would keep it clear in front of her for as long as she needed to. Instead, there was the weight of him—that firm, solid, reassuring weight—and she realised that her need for it had never left her at all.

  They went out for a coffee, and it was early spring with all of the European trees along the street budding into pale green leaves and a pale sun gleaming on the table between them. It was surprisingly good to be there with him, just for an hour—an invigorating break from the judgement and the claustrophobic intensity of her mother’s house. They had always shared a chemistry, Roy and her, something primal and fierce that pulled them together hard when they got too close. She’d always thought, always believed, that if somehow they could learn how to handle it, then everything would fall into place, and all the risk and hardship would have been worth it. She’d put in so much effort and suffered so much to keep her marriage to Roy intact—was she just meant to throw it all away?

  They sat at a table across from one another, a space between them that Roy was careful not to disrupt with his large, restless hands. A girl came and took their order. Roy barely glanced at her before turning back to Maryanne.

  He began to tell her about a house he’d found. It was in Newcastle, only a few hours up the coast, a harbour city, just like Sydney, but smaller and quieter. Yes, there was the steelworks around the upper part of the harbour, and there were the coal-loading terminals too, but the inner-city suburbs were leafy and close to the coast. He’d come across the house by chance when he’d been up that way on a three-month contract. It was nearly a hundred years old, a crumbling inner-city terrace
only a couple of blocks away from the beach, half-ruined, and that’s what had kept it on the market for so long, but underneath the superficial damage it was a treasure, something worth putting yourself into. He’d known as soon as he’d seen it that someone else would jump in if he didn’t, and that an opportunity like that wouldn’t come again. So he’d made a decision, put in an offer for it, hoping that everything would fall into place.

  There was a hospital nearby too, a huge, busy one, right across the road from the beach. Someone like her, with her experience, they’d be sure to snap her up. She’d be able to walk there, it was so close, and look out over the sea while she worked.

  And they’d be able to fall asleep to the sound of waves. Before he’d bought the house, he’d used to stand out the front at night, listening to the way the sea filled the street with its noise and swept all around. It made him think of Maryanne, the passion with which she did everything, how rare that was.

  ‘And you know what I couldn’t stop thinking, Maryanne?’ he said. ‘That the house needs you. You can change a place. Most people can’t, you know. No matter what I do, a house is still a house. I don’t know how to make it anything more. You’re the one that knows how to bring the life into it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ she said.

  He gave a subdued laugh. ‘You know more than I ever will. Everything important I’ve ever learned in my life, it’s been because of you. I’m not saying it’s been easy’—he smiled at her in a knowing way, as if to acknowledge the terrible darkness that set them apart from ordinary people—‘but it’s been something real. That’s life, isn’t it? That’s what life should be.’

  The waitress brought their coffees out. She was young and pretty—fine, blond, shoulder-length hair tucked behind her ears, lively eyes—and she smiled at Roy, pausing for a moment as she turned, her shoulders pushed back a little, the way some women did with an attractive man, but Roy didn’t even look up. Maryanne realised there was a jealousy still in her, a part of her that did not want him to belong to anyone else.